Sunday, June 22, 2014

Geneticists Discover a Way to Extend Lifespans to 800 Years

There is now a way to extend the lifespan of organisms so that humans
could conceivably live to be 800 years old. In an amazing development,
scientists at the University of Southern California have announced that
they've extended the lifespan of yeast bacteria tenfold — and the recipe
they used to do it might easily translate into humans. It involves
tinkering with two genes, and cutting down your calorie intake. Tests
have already started on people in Ecuador.

According to an announcement from PLoS Genetics:

Researchers
have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years
without apparent side effects. The basic but important discovery,
achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings
scientists closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of
all living systems: the cell. "We're setting the foundation for
reprogramming healthy life," says study leader Valter Longo of the
University of Southern California.

Longo's group put baker's yeast on a calorie-restricted diet and knocked
out two genes - RAS2 and SCH9 - that promote aging in yeast and cancer
in humans.

"We got a 10-fold life span extension that is, I think, the longest one
that has ever been achieved in any organism," Longo says. Normal yeast
organisms live about a week.

"I would say 10-fold is pretty significant," says Anna McCormick, chief
of the genetics and cell biology branch at the National Institute on
Aging (NIA) and Longo's program officer. The NIA funds such research in
the hope of extending healthy life span in humans through the
development of drugs that mimic the life-prolonging techniques used by
Longo and others, McCormick adds.

Baker's yeast is one of the most studied and best understood organisms
at the molecular and genetic level. Remarkably, in light of its
simplicity, yeast has led to the discovery of some of the most important
genes and pathways regulating aging and disease in mice and other
mammals.

Longo's group next plans to further investigate life span extension in
mice. The group is already studying a human population in Ecuador with
mutations analogous to those described in yeast.

"People with two copies of the mutations have very small stature and
other defects," Longo says. "We are now identifying the relatives with
only one copy of the mutation, who are apparently normal. We hope that
they will show a reduced incidence of diseases and an extended life
span."

Longo cautions that, as in the Ecuador case, longevity mutations tend to
come with severe growth deficits and other health problems. Finding
drugs to extend the human life span without side effects will not be
easy.

I've always been a skeptic when it comes to life-extending research, but this has me rethinking my position.